We need to prepare now for the next pandemic

THIS May, the World Health Organization (WHO) will seek approval for its global pandemic preparedness plan, a comprehensive strategy to strengthen international response to the next health catastrophe.

The plan has been two years in the making and decided on by WHO’s member-states, as the world grappled with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Covid-19 would eventually afflict about 774 million people and claim 7 million lives.

The pandemic also “ripped apart our social, economic and political systems, and became a multitrillion-dollar problem,” as one WHO official described it.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has highlighted the urgency to approve the plan, believing it “will help to protect our children and grandchildren from future pandemics.”

Tedros, however, is finding out there are obstacles that stand in the way of the plan’s approval. Earlier this week, he said sharp differences among the member-states and “a torrent of fake news, lies and conspiracy theories” threatened to short-circuit efforts to push the plan forward.

For instance, European countries wanted more money invested in pandemic prevention, while Africa wanted more access to “countermeasures” such as vaccines and treatments, Tedros said.

He also denied claims that the accord would give the WHO the power to impose lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

“We cannot allow this historic agreement, this milestone in global health, to be sabotaged,” Tedros said.

As early as 1999, the WHO had developed a six-phase framework for pandemic preparedness and response. It traces the spread of a virus from animals to humans, to “community-level outbreaks” and country-to-country transmission, and finally to a global contagion.

The level of preparedness and mitigation is cranked up at every phase, and the plan also incorporates a post-pandemic recovery effort.

The plan was updated in 2005, but it still proved woefully inadequate against the onslaught of Covid-19.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in WHO’s response was the delay in declaring a pandemic. On Jan. 30, 2020, the agency considered Covid-19 a public health emergency of international concern, its highest level of alert.

The WHO balked at declaring a pandemic because the term was not in the international health regulations, or IHR. It took two months before it acknowledged a global outbreak, and by that time, the virus was wreaking havoc across the world.

During a briefing on March 11, 2020, Tedros announced that there were more than 118,000 Covid cases and 4,291 fatalities in 114 countries.

Tedros said the WHO was “both deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.”

He noted that while some countries were struggling “with a lack of capacity” and “a lack of resources,” there were also countries that were coping with “a lack of resolve” in fighting the pandemic.

WHO said its Covid-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan for 2021 provides the guidelines “for coordinated action that we must take at national, regional and global levels to overcome the ongoing challenges in the response to Covid-19, address inequities and plot a course out of the pandemic.”

Tedros, however, admits that an “extreme” amount of work needs to be done before the plan is put to a vote at the World Health Assembly in March.